Paper on the US Adolescence

So for English this year we had to read this excerpt from the book A Tribe Apart, and write a page response on it. The article was about America’s adolescence and how we can be volatile and misunderstood and all that great stuff you hear about all the time. I kinda liked the paper, so I thought I’d share:

My reaction to this excerpt from A Tribe Apart was a feeling of distant, but familiar connection. It is an article about teens that are my age, so of course I can relate to what the author is saying, but I feel the duty of supporting my generation, who are indeed “a tribe apart” is most important. The article describes this generation almost as if we are specters, vagrants lost in this plane of overused daily routines and isolation. It is like the adolescent population has been put under a microscope in a lab and critically observed for, not the positive actions, but those actions that may lead to the destruction of us all, like some sort of infectious disease. The author gives the feeling that none of the kids in the US care about what the future holds, like when she gives the statistic: “Substantial numbers of American youth are at risk of reaching adulthood unable to meet adequately the requirements of the workplace […].” A reason for this statistic may be that the pressure and extreme competition that the academic world places us under is too much for some, and that we live in a society that glorifies acceleration and leaves those who are not up to par behind to fend for themselves. It is a society where achieving is not enough, and over-achieving is a good start. This generation of teens is faced with pressures that others did not, like more emphasis on secondary education, outlandish college acceptance rates, and expectations that take more than four years of high school to realize. It is a tough world out there, and due to this pressure we have indeed been separated and shoved aside in some aspects, becoming “remote, mysterious, [and] vaguely threatening.” What the author is saying cannot be argued due to statistics, but having a view from the other side of the looking glass puts a feeling on the statistics that computers simply cannot take into account.